"Southern man," Young sang, "better keep your head / Don't forget what your Good Book says / Southern change gonna come at last / Now your crosses are burning fast." The Canadian-born rock legend recorded a pair of tracks, "Southern Man" and "Alabama," ripping white southerners for standing in the way of progress.
Neil Young certainly saw things that way. To many outsiders-especially to liberal-minded people from the North-white Alabamians' militant defense of the color line seemed, simply, indefensible. They rallied around their defiant governor, George Wallace, who marked his inauguration into office in early 1963 by declaring, "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Social change-racial change-came to Alabama in a hurry… but not without generating stiff resistance from more than a few tradition-minded white folks who liked things just fine under the old Jim Crow system of racial segregation. In Birmingham, police attacked civil rights demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses, and Ku Klux Klansmen blew up a black church, killing four little girls attending Sunday School inside. Martin Luther King led protest marchers on a long walk from Selma to Montgomery. It was in Alabama that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. Because no matter where you're from, sweet home Alabama or sweet home Florida or sweet home Arkansas, you can relate.In the 1950s and '60s, Alabama was ground zero for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't cutting him down, it was cutting the song he wrote about the South down. "We loved Neil Young and all the music he's given the world. And so Ronnie just said, 'We need to show people how the real Alabama is.'" Neil Young had 'Southern Man,' and it was kind of cutting the South down. When we were out in the country driving all the time, we would listen to the radio. "We had toured there, going all around playing clubs and National Guard armories. "Everyone thought it was about Neil Young, but it was more about Alabama," he said. Rossington, the sole remaining original band member, gave the last word on the matter in an interview with Garden & Gun in 2015. The portion of the song referring to Governor George Wallace in particular made some believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd disagreed with desegregation, seeing as how the governor stood for " segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever". "Sweet Home Alabama" was allegedly a response to those words. "Don't forget what your good book said/ Southern change gonna come at last/ Now your crosses are burning fast." "Southern man better keep your head," went the chorus of the former. Young had expressed his disappointment with racism in the South in two songs, "Southern Man" and "Alabama". Lynyrd Skynyrd directly name-dropped their supposed adversary, Neil Young, in the song.
charts-its popularity due, at least in part, to a controversy hidden in the verses. Called "Sweet Home Alabama," the single reached number eight on U.S. In 1972, the band, then comprised of lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, drummer Bob Burns, guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington, bassist Leon Wilkeson, and keyboardist Billy Powell released their first self-titled album, followed by another, Second Helping, in 1974. Photo credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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